Meetings often don't accomplish their intended purposes. Participants may show up late or not show up at all. Speakers may take more than their allotted times. Too much time may be spent on an unimportant subject, and too little time may be spent on a critical subject. These and many other problems often plague business and personal meetings, as well as other social encounters.
To make meetings run more efficiently, participants often utilize agendas. The agendas can include a list of topics, a list of speakers, or both. The agendas can also be broken into time segments, each segment being assigned to a particular speaker and/or topic. Creation of the agendas is usually a manual process, performed by someone leading the meeting or by administrative personnel. While the person crafting the agenda may take into account information about the availabilities and schedules of participants, such information is often ignored. And even when the information is not ignored, the schedules of the participants often change after the agenda is created. By the time the meeting takes place, the agenda will often serve at best as a loose guide, with topics being skipped because of late arrivals, early departures, or no-shows of critical participants.